


Eidetic

by Kalya_Lee



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Bucky's Notebooks, Canon-Compliant, Character Study, Gen, Guilt, Memory, POV Second Person, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-14
Packaged: 2018-06-08 08:50:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6847786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After DC, you run. </p>
<p>You keep two notebooks. You do not forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eidetic

**Author's Note:**

> Depictions of violence are more poetic than graphic, but probably deserve a warning. Semi-major spoilers for Civil War.

_You keep two notebooks._

*

There is a man standing in your room with his back to you and a tremor in his hands. When he turns to face you he does not smile. You thought he might. You also thought that was wishful thinking, though, so it’s alright.

He says: “Do you know me.”

You tell him a lie. He does not believe you.

(You keep two notebooks. He just happened to find the right one.)

*

_Margaret Andrews. Age 17. Daughter of Alan Andrews, nuclear scientist, retired. Single gunshot to the head._

_Her friends had called her Peggy._

*

After DC, you run.

At first it is sloppy: stolen money, stolen clothes, hiding in the wheel-wells of planes. Moving weekly, sometimes daily, city to city and sleeping in gutters.

Later, you are better. You fake papers, linger longer. Smile at people in the streets. You have neighbours and they look right through you, you are friendly with the stallholders at the market, you are harmless and historyless and human. Hiding in plain sight.

Running is a skill. It requires more than instinct, more than fear. It requires finesse, and practice, and knowledge. It requires memory.

Memory.

(You keep two notebooks.)

*

_Richard Tate. Age 53. Politician. Strangulation, left arm, no fingerprints._

_He had been sleeping across the hall from his son._

*

The first time it comes, you are standing in a subway station in Manhattan. The pulse hits you from behind, like a bullet to the spine, relentless, and you exhale as your knees crack the tile on the floor.

You stay there a moment, palms braced against the cool of the concrete and ceramic, head hung. You feel like vomiting; maybe you do. You haven’t eaten in days so you can’t tell. Around you, the crowd pulses, unseeing, parting silently around you or jostling you out of the way.

(This is why you don’t trust people. This is also why you feel so comfortable in crowds.)

The second time it comes you are perched on the landing gear of a plane headed for Aberdeen. It comes in waves, this time, instead of all at once, and each wave leaves you rolling and roiling and unable to breathe. You lose – minutes, maybe, maybe hours – you lose _time_ , your eyes shut and ears popping. You blame it on the lack of air pressure. You know that is not why.

You come to cold all over. Part of this is altitude. Part of this is not.

The third time it comes you disappear. When you return the fingers of your right hand are shredded. There are scratches on the side of the bridge you are hiding under, angry savage scratches like some primitive language buried under the sands, and they are marked with blood.

The fourth time –

The fourth time you are ready.

*

_Hunter Basey. Age 25. Jillian Michaels. Age 23. Holidaymakers, probably a couple. Shrapnel in the chest and neck from a grenade._

_Collateral damage._

*

They tortured you. It took time. You were hard to break.

You do not come to this knowledge in the same way you come to the rest of it, no. This you do not have to remember. This you _know_.

When they broke you, you had grown accustomed to pain. What could they know of pain that you did not already know. They had fire on their side, and they had ice, and they had blades that could slice right through muscle and tendon and bone, but you. You were a creature born of blood and spark and snow. You had already fallen once.

When they broke you, they did not take your body. That was already theirs and still you were – you _were_.

Before, they cut you open and you looked into their eyes and told them to go to hell. Before, they cut you open just to see how you worked, and still you won because they could not understand. Before, they cut you open, and you screamed. You screamed. But you did not break.

When they broke you, they cut you open. And then they stole your mind.

*

Steve would say: _oh, Bucky._ Steve would say: _this is because you were strong._

Steve would call you a hero. Say: _you were stronger than them, look, look at you, look how far they had to go to make you theirs._ Steve would say: _look how you kept fighting_.

You do not say these things. You are not Steve.

You broke, after all, in the end.

*

_Amelia Clancy. Age 67. Former espionage agent, agency unknown. Double gunshot, to the chest and to the temple._

_She had stared you down as you levelled the gun._

*

You steal pens from banks, from broken-into hotel rooms, from fast food restaurants that place them next to customer experience surveys. You collect them, hoard them, almost obsessively, in a pile under your bed.

They’re cheap, obviously, made of brittle plastic and ink wells nearly dried. Your handwriting comes out scratchy and uneven, the ink sputtering and scraping out of the nibs as your fingers relearn how to form letters out of the small twitches you’d been trained to hide.

You could get better pens, with quick-flowing ink and heavy pointed nibs, with larger grips that feel less like toothpicks and more like triggers, that would fit more easily between your fingers. You could get better pens, but you don’t.

You hold your pens in clenched fists. The ones you steal are all ballpoints.

It’s much harder to stab someone with a ballpoint.

*

_Soo An Li. Age 24. Writer. Poison in her water triggering cardiac arrest._

_She had been courting her pen pal by love letter. To your knowledge they never met face to face, and he may still not know that she is dead._

*

They gave you the names. Before, and after, they gave you the names. In the mission briefing. In the report. You were the Asset. The victims, they named.

You still don’t understand _why._

*

The fourth time it comes, you are waiting for it, cross-legged on your mattress with a pen in your hand and an aspirin clenched between your teeth. Biting down on it feels like clamping your jaw around the bite guard; you breathe around it, harsh and rattling, and it feels more or less appropriate.

The remembrance comes like a waterfall, names and dates and places, flashes of blood and metal in vivid detail. The world around you burns. You burn – houses, and. And people, and _situations_ , and empires, and you.

This is the point where you will get lost. This is the point, you recall, where you have gotten lost before. When your head feels like it’s splitting open, worse even than your hazy fever-memories of the chair; when your stomach flips over and inside-out; when you want to take that weapon they grafted onto your collarbone and rip your own face off.

This time, you bite down until your jaw aches and you keep your eyes open. You keep breathing. And you write.

You come out of the dark with the powder of a crushed pill in the back of your throat, a cramp in your right hand, and three pages of names in small crowded black letters. You are still breathing.

Progress.

*

_George Aliyev. Age 46. Defector. Blood loss from two gunshots: one to the right shoulder, one to the left kneecap, slightly misaligned to hide sniping skill._

_You never really knew what he had defected from._

*

Steve says: “They’re not planning on taking you alive.”

His face is grim, his mouth set in a firm hard line. You know this face. It’s his Captain America face, though it’s always been his, even before he’d gone off to become a lab rat for a man thankfully much kinder than the ones who’d managed to lay their hands on you.   

You look up at him. Something in your chest is caught. For a moment, stupidly, childishly, you wish he would smile at you.

Steve says: _they’ll kill you_. You say: “Good.”

Somewhere, somewhere deep down where you are screaming, you mean it.

*

_Anna Simeon, Janice Holloway, Elizabeth Jones. Barnabas Soh, Jonathan Irving, Harrison Chaney. Age 11. Sarah Farrow. Age 32. Fire._

_There had been five minutes left in the English lesson._

*

When they took your mind, they tore it open.

They pushed it down into water, into chemicals that turned the sky into the sea, dark and bubbling; they ripped it apart with electricity when the chemicals drained away. They put you in the dark and froze you, till you were starving, a space between your eyes like a vacuum, and then they fed you with words and you drank them down without question, you were hungry for them, and so that’s on you, isn’t it.

They took you to pieces, careful and precise. Left the reflexes, the senses, the pain receptors. Took the conscience, the emotions, the memories. Later, they give you back your speech. They give you back your logic, the little you cling to with no knowledge to feed it. They hadn’t thought it necessary, at first; a fist does not need to speak. But you are not a fist. You are more. You are a killer.

When they took your mind, they tore it open. And then they did it again. Every time they took you out and loaded you, they did it again. Then, you did not know. You did not understand. How could you? They had your mind.

Now, you can see. See the scars, the places they stripped you bare. See the memories growing back, like sap oozing over torn bark, like a blood clot, like scar tissue. Now you understand.

They broke you because they could. They hurt you because they could. But they took you apart because they had to.

If you had remembered who you were, you would have killed them all the second your fingers closed around a gun.

If you had remembered what you’d done, you would have done the same. And then you would have shot yourself.

*

Steve says: _they’ll kill you_. You say: “Good.”

Steve says: _run_. And so you do.

You take the backpack because you can steal what you need when you are running but you don’t want to, and because it has Notebook 2 in the pocket. You keep the notebooks because your mind may be yours again but your memory is a cringing wounded thing that you no longer trust, and you cannot forget. You cannot.

Notebook 1 is sitting on the shelf where Steve replaced it. You are about to reach for it but you hear the footsteps on the stair and you know you are out of time. The loss of it rips a hole across your breastbone. You tell yourself you don’t care; it’s the less important of the two, anyway.

Steve says: _I’m afraid that you will kill them_. He does not say the words, of course, but. You can read it in his eyes.

You say: “I’m not going to kill anyone.”

You mean this, too. You have enough nightmares.   

*

_Graham Smith. Age 42. Technician. Samuel Laurent. Age 47. Handler. Broken skull and snapped spine, respectively._

_These, you do not regret._

*

These are not the only things you remember. These are not the only things you remember. These are not the only things you remember.

You remember: Steve Rogers, age 7. Tripping over his own shoelaces and bloodying his nose on the pavement chasing down a bully. Steve Rogers, age 14. Sketching a sunset with worn-down dime-store pencils and his skinny artist’s fingers. Steve Rogers, age 18, arm around your shoulders, too-warm forehead pressed against your chest.

You remember: Bucky Barnes, age 12. Eating a Sunday roast, thin slices, chipped carving knife in your mother’s warm work-roughened hands. Bucky Barnes, age 16. Braiding the hair of a girl with slender lanky calves and a nose like yours, brighter eyes. Bucky Barnes, age 25. Back straight in Basic, learning to fire a gun.

You remember. You remember. You _remember_.

You keep two notebooks. One is for this, for the memory of sunshine, for the years when you were a person. One is for you. For Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.

The other is for everyone else.

*

_Howard Stark. Age 74. Inventor. Blow to the head, caved-in skull. Maria Stark. Age 61. Philanthropist. Strangulation._

_He knew you._

*

There is a man standing in dead air beside you with his eyes wide and a tremor in his hands. When he raises his hand to shoot you know you deserve it. You fight back anyway.

He says: “Do you even remember them.”

You tell him the truth. He does not believe you.

You knew he wouldn’t. You wish he would.

*

After DC, you run. You hide, looking over your shoulder and avoiding other eyes, you sleep in gutters, you starve. Later, you gain: a roof, a routine, a set of acquaintances.

You keep two notebooks. You remember.

After DC, you run. You live. Sometimes, rarely, you smile. When you smile, you think, with a viciousness that clears the fog in your head and slices like catharsis to your bones: _Guess what, you bastards. Guess what._

(And other times, you wonder if maybe they _knew_.

Knew you would break free. Knew you would heal.

Knew you would remember.)

(Sometimes you are sure that they did.)

*

_James Buchanan Barnes. Age 27. Soldier. Fall from a train._

_His friends had called him Bucky_.

*

(They gave you the names, after all.)


End file.
